William Orbit, pop producer for Madonna, All Saints and more, dies aged 69
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- William Orbit died at home on 23 July aged 69, his family announced on social media; no cause of death was given.
- Orbit produced Madonna's 1998 album "Ray of Light," which won her three of her five Grammy nominations in 1999 and is widely regarded as her greatest studio album; Madonna called him "a complete madman genius" and said he was left alone in "the laboratory" with her melodies and lyrics.
- Orbit produced Blur's 1999 album "13" — which frontman Damon Albarn later described as a "psychiatrist" session for his breakup with Justine Frischmann — and All Saints' UK chart-toppers "Black Coffee" and "Pure Shores."
- U2's "Electrical Storm" (UK No 5) and "The Hands That Built America" — the theme for Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" — were among Orbit's other late-90s and early-2000s credits, alongside work for Pink, Britney Spears and Robbie Williams.
- In March, Orbit publicly scotched rumours of a new collaboration with Madonna, writing on social media: "I reached out. And there has been heard. Nil response," adding that he had an album ready he considered the "successor to ROL."
- Orbit had told the Guardian about a substance-abuse crisis four years earlier involving marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, MDMA, cocaine and codeine that culminated in a psychotic episode and involuntary sectioning.
- Orbit also produced the long-lost Freddie Mercury–Michael Jackson duet "There Must Be More to Life Than This," originally recorded in the early 1980s and released in 2014.
Why it matters: Orbit's death closes a chapter for the late-90s electronic-pop crossover he helped define: "Ray of Light" remains Madonna's most Grammy-decorated album, and his work for Blur, All Saints and U2 in a single industrious period reshaped the textures of British and American pop. No cause of death has been disclosed, and the unrealised Ray of Light successor he claimed to have ready in March — with Madonna apparently uninterested — now never arrives.
